In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

The two-minute 'Shadow'

Marcel makes quick work of Gilberte Swann. As with Swann before him, the
more desperately he loves the girl, the less interest she displays in
return. So he decides to put his love on ice, while maintaining his
friendship with her parents.

Then, two years later, it's off to Balbec. (By my calculus, Marcel is now
sixteen, and still astonishing dependent on his mother and grandmother.)
He spends a seemingly endless summer at a grand hotel on the Normandy coast,
watching strange places and people become familiar to him. He becomes
an improbably close friend of the Guermantes aristocrat, Robert de Saint-Loup,
and of the painter Elstir (whom we met as a foolish young man belonging to
Madame Verdurin's "little clan" in Swann's Way).
He also meets the Baron de Charlus, who deigns to make a move on him, an
overture which only mystifies Marcel.

More important than any of these is his acquaintance with the "little
band" of girls whom he describes as adolescent, and who sometimes behave
that way, but who surely are older. Indeed, two of them seem to be sitting
for the bac or high-school leaving exam, which Proust passed —
in economics and mathematics — just as he turned eighteen. (There is
also the matter of the book's title: some argue that "en fleur" is a
reference to the menarche, which in 1900 was about fourteen for European
and North American girls. Indeed, according to his grand-niece and
biographer, that's why Scott Moncrieff chose to bowdlerize Proust's
title for the book.)

Marcel focuses his adoration, first on one, then on another of these
young women, but it is obvious to everyone except him that Albertine Simonet
will be the love of his life.

Evolving characters, revisiting the past

One of Proust's great themes (and talents!) is showing character and how
it may change over time. In the second volume of his masterwork, he deals
with friendship, including the curious sort of friendship that is carnal
love. How do we bridge the gap between the stranger and the dear person he
or she will become, as friend or lover? First up: Gilberte Swann, whom Marcel
first adores and then, after considerable pain, trains himself to ignore.
Then there's Robert de Saint-Loup, so marvelous that the modern reader wants
to kick him in the pants. And of course there is Albertine, the obsession
toward which Marcel has been working all this time.

He is equally adept with the pretentious and social-climbing Bloch, whom
we met in Swann's Way as a "precious youth," greatly admired by the
narrator. That admiration has now been qualified. Just as the homosexual
Proust is often harsh in his treatment of "inverts," so does he, the son of
a Jewish mother, verge on anti-semitism in his ridicule of Bloch's family,
especially the uncle, Nissim Bernard. (Bloch's first name is Albert, though
I confess I had to look it up. Nor does he have much in the way of physical
characteristics. He's a year or two older than Marcel, though they were
schoolmates at one time.)

As the title suggests, memory is a major theme of In Search of Lost
Time. The author's understanding of memory is clearly stated in this
second volume, in the words of James Grieve for the Penguin Proust:

[T]he greater part of our memory lies outside us,
in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's
first fires, things through which we can retrieve ... last vestige of the
past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears have dried, can
make us weep again.
Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away.... It is only because we
have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were,
envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not
ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no
longer care about.

This is what Roger Shattuck calls Proust's
"binocular vision." Forgetting is as important as remembering! The crumb of
madeleine dipped in herbal tea does not return us to the past: rather,
and despite what Proust seems to be saying above, we bring the separation
with us. It is this double vision that makes the experience so poignant.

The new translations

For the Penguin/Viking
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, James Grieve swings a bit wilder
than Lydia Davis did for Swann's Way. Where Scott Moncrieff translated
petite bande (of girls) with "little band," Grieve uses "little gang,"
which to my ear sounds a bit too tough. Then there is the astonishing
conversation between Bloch and Marcel, referring back to an occasion when
Marcel was walking in the Bois-de-Boulogne with Gilberte and her mother.
Along comes Bloch, who takes his hat off to Odette without eliciting any
recognition from her in turn; then, afterward, she mystifies Marcel by
referring to Bloch by another name.

Now, at Balbec, Bloch is anxious to discover her name, but Marcel
is so puzzled that he doesn't oblige. Bloch then rattles on to claim an
sexual romp with Madame Swann. This is how it appears in the original:

In Within a Budding Grove, Scott Moncrieff translated this
quotation in words superficially close to the original, though baffling to
a 21st century American, who has never ridden a Zone (circumferential)
railroad, nor heard "zone" used as a synonym for a woman's girdle:

"Whoever she is," he went on, "hearty
congratulations; you can't have been bored with her. I picked her up a few
days before that on the Zone railway, where, speaking of zones, she was so
kind as to undo hers for the benefit of your humble servant...."

For the
Modern Library edition, Kilmartin and Enright follow this language
almost exactly, but Mr. Grieve translates much more freely:

"Well, anyway," he said, "you deserve to be
congratulated—she must have given you a nice time. I had just met her
a few days before, you see, riding on the suburban line. She had no objection
to yours truly, and so a nice ride was had by one and all...."

For the Yale University Press edition of
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, William Carter had the happy
inspiration of using the American term "Beltway" for le train de
Ceinture, which fits so nicely with the idea of Odette's taking off her
"belt" — if Bloch is telling the truth and she did indeed take if off!
(In Proust's time, the Chemin de Fer de Petite Ceinture or "little
belt railroad" connected all the train stations of Paris but has since been
abandoned.)

Much the same is true of one of my favorite passages of Proust's, which
I have underlined in all my editions of the novel:

"It is one of the systems of hygiene among which
we are at liberty to choose our own, a system which is perhaps not to be
recommended too strongly, but it gives us a certain tranquillity with which
to spend what remains of life, and also — since it enables us to
regret nothing, by assuring us that we have attained to the best, and that
the best was nothing out of the ordinary — with which to resign ourselves
to death."

Isn't that lovely? (It's from the 1981 Random House edition of
Remembrance of
Things Past, revised by Terence Kilmartin in light of recent French
scholarship.) I read it aloud to a Harvard freshman whom my daughter
brought home for Thanksgiving dinner, along with some other waifs and strays
who lived in distant countries or had no home to go to. Edward admitted that
he was disappointed by Harvard; having grown up in the ghetto, he'd hoped
to enter an entirely new life at Harvard, only to arrive in Cambridge and
find it full of over-bright, upward-striving youngsters exactly like himself.
I don't know if Proust was any consolation, but Edward had indeed attained
to the best. If he'd gone instead to City College, he might have spent
the rest of his life wishing he'd aimed higher.

In my judgment, Grieve falls far short in his version:

"[T]herein lies one of the modes of mental
hygiene available to us, which, though it may not be the most recommendable,
can certainly afford us a measure of equanimity for getting through life
and — since it enables us to have no regrets, by assuring us that we
have had the best of things, and that the best of things was not up to
much — of resigning us to death."

Recommendable? Equanimity? I don't think so!

Which translation to buy?

Altogether, I cast my vote for the Yale University Press edition of
In the Shadow of Young Girls in
Flower. Like James Grieve, William Carter often goes back to the
original to improve Scott Moncrieff's sometimes musty language. To prepare
for this reading, I downloaded the public-domain e-books, both
in English and
in French,
so I could compare the language to that of Scott Moncrieff and, where it
had changed, to the Proustian original. Really, there's scarcely a sentence
that Mr. Carter hasn’t changed, always for the better and often getting
closer to Proust’s

For example: when Marcel first enters the grand seaside hotel at Balbec,
where he’ll meet those young girls in flower, he is awed by the
majesty of the elevator boy. He tries to placate him with chatter, but
“il ne me répondit pas.” Scott Moncrieff rendered this as
“he vouchsafed no answer,” phrasing which appears unchanged in
today's Modern Library edition. Mr. Carter is more straightforward: “he
did not answer me.” Just so!

To his credit, James Grieve also gets this right. But I cannot forgive
him "the little gang" or his butchering of my favorite passage.